The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) (20 page)

Kennedy went to a sideboard and poured himself a large glass of bourbon. “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you any men,” he said. “You heard, did you, Ben? We got hit by a big fleet of that nigger’s land ’clads. We were lucky to get through at all.”

“I heard.” Beesley turned small, cold eyes on me. “And that is the traitor, is it?”

“I had better tell you now,” I said, though suddenly I was reluctant to justify myself, “that I joined Cicero Hood’s entourage with the express purpose of trying to put a stop to his activities.”

“And how did you intend to do that, Mr. Bastable?” said Beesley, leaning forward and winking at Kennedy.

“My original plan was to assassinate him,” I said simply.

“But you didn’t.”

“After the Land Leviathan made its appearance I saw that killing Hood would do no good. He is the only one who has any control at all over the Black Horde. To kill him would have resulted in making things worse for you and all the other Europeans.”

Beesley sniffed skeptically and sipped his drink, adding: “And what proof have we got of all this? What proof is there that you’re not still working for Hood, that you’re not planning to kill
me?”

“None,” I said. “But I want to discuss ways of stopping the Land Leviathan,” I told him. “Those walls you’re building will stop that monster no more than would paper. If we can dig some kind of deep trench—lay a trap like a gigantic animal trap—we might be able to put it out of action for a while at least...”

But President Beesley was smirking and shaking his head.

“We’re ahead of you, Mr. Bastable. There’s more than one kind of wall, you know. You’ve only seen what you might call our first line of defense.”

“There isn’t anything made strong enough to stop the Land Leviathan,” I said emphatically.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Beesley gave Kennedy another of his secret looks. “Do you want to show him around, Joe? I think we can trust him. He’s one of us.”

Kennedy was not so certain. “Well, if you think so...”

“Sure I do. I have my hunches. He’s okay. A bit misguided, a bit short on imagination—a bit English, eh? But a decent sort. Welcome to Washington, Mr. Bastable. Now you’ll see how that black scum is to be stopped.”

A while later we left the White House in a horse-drawn carriage provided for us. Kennedy, with some pride, explained how the Capitol had been turned into a well-defended arsenal and how every one of those overblown neo-Graecian buildings contained virtually every operational big gun left in the United States.

But it was not the architecture or the details of the defense system which arrested my vision—it was what I saw in the streets as I passed. Washington had always had a very large Negro population, and now this population was being put to use by the whites. I saw gangs of exhausted, half-starved men, women and children, shackled to one another by chains about the neck, wrists or ankles, hauling huge loads of bricks and sand-bags to the barricades. It was a scene from the past—with sweating, dying black slaves being worked, quite literally, to death by brutal white overseers armed with long bull-whips which they used liberally and with evident relish. It was a sight I had never expected to witness in the twentieth century! I was horrified, but did my best not to betray my emotion to Kennedy, who had not appeared to notice what was going on!

More than once I winced and was sickened when I saw some poor, near-naked woman fall and receive a torrent of abuse, kicked and whipped until she was forced to her feet again, or helped to her feet by her companions. Once I saw a half-grown boy collapse and it was quite plain that he was dead, but his fellow slaves were made to drag his corpse with them by the chains which secured his wrists to theirs.

Trying to appear insouciant, I said as coolly as I could: “I see now how you managed to raise the walls so quickly. You have reintroduced slavery.”

“Well, you could call it that, couldn’t you?” Kennedy grinned. “The blacks are performing a public service, like the rest of us, helping to build up the country again. Besides,” and his face became serious, “it’s what they know best. It’s what most of ’em prefer. They don’t think and feel the same as us, Bastable. It’s like your worker bee—stop him from working and he becomes morbid and unhappy. Eventually he dies. It’s the same with the blacks.”

“Their ultimate fate would seem to be identical, however you look at it,” I commented.

“Sure, but this way they’re doing some good.”

I must have seen several thousand Negroes as we traveled through the streets of Washington. A few were evidently employed as individual servants and were in a somewhat better position than their fellows, but most were chained together in gangs, sweating copiously for all that the weather was chill. There was little hope on any of their faces and I was not proud of my own race when I looked at them; also I could not help recalling the pride—arrogance, some would call it—in the bearing of Hood’s Ashanti troops.

I stifled the thought, at that moment, but it kept coming back to me with greater and greater force. It was unjust to enslave other human beings and cruel to treat them in such a manner, whichever side committed the injustice. Yet it seemed to me that there was a grain more justice in Hood’s policies—for he was repaying a debt, whereas men such as Beesley and Kennedy were acting from the most brutal and cynical of motives.

Mildly, I said: “But isn’t it poor economics to work them so hard? They’ll give you better value if they’re treated a little better.”

“That logic led to the Civil War, Mr. Bastable,” said Kennedy, as if speaking to a child. “You start thinking like that and sooner or later they decide
they
deserve to be treated like white men and you get the old social ills being repeated over again. Besides,” he grinned broadly, “there’s not a lot of point in worrying too much about the life expectancy of our Washington niggers, as you’ll see.”

We were driving close to one of the main walls now. Here, as everywhere, huge gangs of Negroes were being forced to work at inhuman speed. It was no longer any mystery how Washington had managed to get its defenses up so rapidly. I tried to recall the stories of what Hood had done to the whites in Scandinavia, but even the stories, exaggerated and encouraged by Hood himself to improve his savage image, paled in comparison to the reality of what was happening in modern-day Washington!

As we passed the walls, I noticed that large cages, rather like the cages used for transporting circus animals about the country, were much in evidence on top of the walls. I pointed them out and asked Kennedy what they were.

He smirked as he leaned back in the carriage and lit a cigar.
“They,
Mr. Bastable, are our secret weapon.”

I did not ask him to amplify this statement. I had become too saddened by the fate of the Negroes. I told Kennedy that I was tired and would like to rest. The carriage was turned about and I was taken to a hotel quite close to the Capitol, where I was given a room overlooking a stretch of parkland.

But even here I could look out through my windows and see evidence of the brutality of the whites. Not a hundred yards away, a pit of quick-lime had been sunk, and into it, from time to time, carts would dump the bodies of the dead and the dying.

I thought that I had witnessed Hell in Southern England, but now I knew that I had only been standing on the outskirts. Here, where it had once been declared an article of faith that all men were created equal, where it had seemed possible for the eighteenth-century ideals of reason and justice to be made reality, here was Hell, indeed!

And it was a hell created in the name of my own race, whose survival I hoped to ensure with my resistance to Hood and his Black Horde.

I slept badly at the hotel and the next morning sought an interview with ‘President’ Beesley at the White House. I received word that he was too busy to see me. I wandered about the streets, but there was too much there to turn my stomach. I began to feel angry. I felt frustrated. I wanted to remonstrate with Beesley, to beg him to show mercy to the blacks, to set an example of tolerance and decency to his white-hooded followers. Gandhi had been right. There was only one way to behave, even if it seemed, in the short term, against one’s self-interest. Surely it was in one’s self-interest in the long term to exhibit generosity, humanity, kindness and a sense of justice to one’s fellow men. It was cynicism of Beesley’s kind which had, after all, led to the threatened extinction of the whole human race. There could be no such thing as a ‘righteous’ war, for war was by its very nature an act of injustice against the individual, but there could be such a thing as an ‘unrighteous’ war—an evil war, a war begun by men who were utterly corrupt, both morally and intellectually. I had begun to think that it was a definition of those who would make war—that whatever motives they claimed, whatever ideals they promoted, whatever ‘threat’ they referred to, they could not be excused—because of their actions they could only be of a degenerate and immoral character.

Gandhi had said that violence bred violence. Well, it seemed that I was witnessing a living lesson in this creed! I realized how close I had, myself, been to the brink of behaving brutally and cynically, when I had contemplated the assassination of Hood.

Once again, at about the worst time possible, I found my loyalties divided, my mind in confusion, filled with a sense of the impossibility of any action whatsoever on my own part.

I had wandered away from the main roads of Washington and into a series of residential streets full of those fine terraced houses reminiscent of our own Regency squares and crescents. The houses, however, were much run-down. In most cases there was no glass in the windows and many doors showed signs of having been forced. I guessed that there had been fighting here, not by an invading army, but between the Negroes and the whites.

I was speculating, again, on the nature of the animal cages placed along the walls of the city, when I turned a corner and was confronted with a long line of black workers, chained ankle to ankle, shuffling along the centre of the road and pulling a big, wheeled platform on which had been piled a tottering mountain of sand-bags. There was hardly one of these people who was not bleeding from the cuts of the long whips wielded by armed overseers. Many seemed hardly capable of putting one foot in front of the other. They seemed destined, very shortly, for the lime-pits—and yet they were singing. They were singing as the Christian martyrs had been said to sing on their way to the Roman arena. They were singing a dirge of which it was difficult to distinguish the words at first. The white men, clad in heavy hoods, were yelling at them to stop. Their voices were muffled, but their whips were eloquent. But still the Negroes sang and now I made out some of the words.

“He will come
—he will come
—

Out of Africa
—he will come
—

He will ride the Beast
—he will come
—

He will set us free
—he will come
—

He will bring us Pride
—he will come
—”

There was no question, of course, that the song referred to Hood and that it was being sung deliberately to incense the whites. The refrain was being sung by a tall, handsome young man who somehow managed to lift his head and keep his shoulders straight no matter how many savage blows fell upon him. His dignity and his courage were so greatly in contrast to the hysterical and cowardly actions of the whites that it was impossible to feel anything but admiration for him.

But I think that the gang of slaves was doomed. They would not stop singing and now, ominously, the hooded whites lowered their whips and began to take their guns from their shoulders.

The procession stopped.

The voices stopped.

The first white ripped off his hood and revealed a hate-filled face which could have seen no more than seventeen summers. He raised his weapon to his shoulders, grinning.

“Okay—you wanna go on singing?”

The tall Negro took a breath, knowing that it was probably his last, and began the first words of the chant.

That was when, impulsively, I dived for the boy, throwing my whole weight against him so that his shot went into the air. I had grabbed the gun even as I fell on top of him. I heard confused shouts and then heard the sharp report of another rifle. I saw a bullet strike the body of the boy and I used that body as cover, shooting back at my fellow whites!

I should not have lasted long, of course, had not the tall Negro uttered a bellow which was almost gleeful and led his companions upon the whites, who had their backs to the blacks while they concentrated on me.

I saw white hoods bobbing for a moment in a sea of black, blistered flesh. I heard a few shots fired and then it was over. The whites lay dead upon the pavement and the blacks were using their guns to shoot themselves free of the chains on their legs. I was not sure how I would be received and I stood up cautiously, ready to run if necessary, for I knew that many Negroes felt little sentimentality to whites, even if those whites were not directly involved in harming them.

Then the black youth grinned at me. “Thanks, mister. Why ain’t you wearing your hood?”

“I have never worn one,” I told him. “I’m British.”

I suppose I must have sounded a little pompous, for the youth laughed aloud at this, before saying: “We’d better get off the streets fast.”

He began to direct his people into the nearby houses, which proved to be deserted. The wheeled platform and the corpses of the whites, stripped of their guns and, for some mysterious reason, their hoods, were left behind.

The youth led us through the back yards of the houses, darting from building to building until he came to one he recognized. This he entered, leading us into the cellars and there pausing for breath.

“We’ll leave those who’re too sick to go any further here,” he said. “Also the kids.” He grinned at me. “What about you, mister? You can give us that rifle and go free, if you want to. There were no witnesses. You’ll be all right. They’ll never know there was a white man involved.”